REFLECT YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS

It is less than a week away from the joys of celebrating my favorite holiday! I can’t believe how time flies!

My heart is filled with so much love and gratitude today. Not only am I grateful for my partner, her son, my son, our parents and siblings, and friends, I’m also very grateful for all of you who read my blog each week. Thank you. I’m also extremely grateful for all of my clients for not only trusting me with their stories, but giving me the honor and privilege of telling their stories that they absolutely feel need to be told.

For the longest time, I remained in motion towards my dreams, but doubted the ability for them to materialize on a large scale based on countless moments and experiences of failure and defeat. Sure, I experienced successes in the past, but not to the degree that I sincerely desired. When I look back on my 20-year career as a writer, I now see instances of subconsciously sabotaging all of my efforts and then complaining about how things were not going my way.

Today’s topic is on authentically reflecting on your successes and failures in 2017, and what you can learn from them in order to move forward in 2018.

I invite you to forget about useless New Year’s resolutions. Instead, I want you to discover who you are. Why do you do what you do? In this discovery you’ll find the answer that you need in order to experience the success that you’re looking for as an entrepreneurial artist.

There are things in life that we don’t know that we don’t know. There wasn’t a mistake in that sentence. There really are things that we DON’T know that we don’t know. And that’s usually an okay deal until WHAT we don’t know has a huge impact on our lives to the point of hindering us from moving forward.

This year I discovered what I didn’t know about myself. Despite having high self-esteem, I struggled with confidence with marketing myself as a writer. I had a little confidence, but not enough to make me believe in new possibilities for myself. I struggled and battled my own internal voices. Taking actions, but not believing that they would lead to a desired result, and then self-sabotaging the experiences to make sure what I didn’t believe could happen, would absolutely NOT happen. I then got the privilege of saying how I was “right” instead of saying “I’m successful.”

Some of us work so hard to be “right,” that we lose sight of what we actually desire for ourselves. We then wonder why life isn’t “working” for us. However, 100% of the time this has something to do with our perception of a situation. Our perception causes us to take actions and to have the attitude based on our preconceived perceptions of people, circumstances, and ideas.

I remember that I had a producer interested in my work a few years back. A wonderful opportunity for a screenwriter who wants one of her screenplays produced, right? I met her at an industry-related event. We connected on a professional level, and she was interested in my completed script. I followed up with her shortly after we met. She actually responded favorably and asked for my script. I didn’t immediately send it. In the back of my mind, I was playing an “old broken” record that kept reminding me of how she was going to disappoint me like all of the other producers that I “wasted” my time contacting. When I finally followed through, she wasn’t interested any longer. I messed up an opportunity that was directly in front of me. An opportunity that I created through pitching my work. The same work that I ended up sabotaging by not following through in a timely manner.

I don’t do this any longer. I seize opportunities. I jump on them as if all I have is the present because in all honesty, that is all of have. The right now. The future and the past don’t exist, so I have to act right now. Discovering how my lack of confidence has played out in my career has actually given me inspiration to choose different ways of handling situations. I follow through with people that I meet in a timely fashion. I act quickly and with confidence because I have nothing to lose, yet I have an entire career to expand upon and gain.

This year is the year that I declared that I am a full-time writer, and I chose to live into that role regardless of obstacles, what my bank account reflected, or regardless of any discouraging remarks said by others. This is one of the greatest years of my career, but also the hardest.

I am officially a full-time writer making a living doing what I love to do. My clients are amazing people, and it is my absolute honor to be able bring their stories to life. A while back, I used to just write for myself, yelling at the “world” that I only want to write my own stories and produce my own material, but the most rewarding part of what I do TODAY is telling other people’s stories. Being able to have an impact on others far outweighs my desire to only write my own material. I still write my original content, but because I changed my perception of what a successful writer is, I’m able to touch so many people’s lives in ways that I never imagined.

Today’s LESSON is to live out your entrepreneurial artistic dream authentically, acknowledging both the failures and successes along the way.

FUN ASSIGNMENT: Create a collage or make a list of each one of your successes in 2017. Relive and enjoy those moments. Then write a list of all of your career defeats in 2017. Take the time to consider what you learned from each of those defeats and write out how that will impact your career as you move forward.